I don’t know about you, but when I’m hankerin’ for balls, I don’t want them to be adulterated. No fillers in the balls please. No preservatives either. The balls should be protein-rich, organic, and ready to eat. Don’t put flour all over the balls, or dip them in soya sauce. Just give me some simple, traditional, nut balls, the way grandma made them. Is that too much to ask for?

I have to confess: this is perhaps the least objectionable of the pumpkin pie trend horrors. Caramel popcorn is already a thing, as awful as I may personally find it. Some stickler for detail decided to call it “pumpkin pie” and note that a seasonal spice blend is really what “pumpkin” denotes today. In fact, I’m willing to say this pumpkin pie popcorn is almost a secret agent, a quiet force of rebellion against ubiquitous pumpkin spice domination.

You know those times when you want nostalgic carbs, but you also want cold cuts? And you need an efficient product that can deliver both into your insatiable maw at the same time, as part of one sandwich mega-complex? And you know how you despair of ever being able to eat with such pleasure-less calculation? Rest assured, food engineers have developed the solution of your dreams.

Thank you, Hailey, for stomaching the sight of this long enough to take a picture.

Well, given that women are biologically incapable of using the same soap or shaving gel or dumbbells as men (ours have to be pink or we drop them), it stands to reason that we cannot eat the same energy mix as men. Men’s food gives them the energy to build the world, boss people around, criticize stuff, and make up stupid products to sell to women. Women’s snacks make them…. glow.

(Thanks for the folks who pointed out that this was a snack, not coffee!)

I begin to ask myself what it could have been, this powerful taste that brought no proof, but the overwhelming experience of wretchedness, of the degradation of the human soul in this age of unreality, of the putrefaction of good sense and beauty and harmony.

And then I dip the pumpkin spice madeleine in the coffee again, and it all unfolds before me. The flavour, haunting in its stupid familiarity, calls into the recesses of my soul. It reeks of burnt beans and misspelled names and lascivious squirts of vanilla syrup from moldy tubs. Suddenly, just as a cup sleeve of corrugated cardboard that seems flat, given a tiny amount of pressure from the fingers, pops into a round window, an effigy of protection from a boiling beverage, the memory takes shape before my eyes.

I am a teenager, in a suburb with no identifying marks whatsoever, its relentless blandness a war against beauty or sensual experience. I do not really like coffee, but I fill a cup with six packets of sugar to make the bitter liquor somewhat palatable. Soon I discover a way to burn even the last trace of flavour away, a corporate solution for any stubborn flashes of creativity that may remain in our hearts, a final goodbye to subtlety and variation and natural goodness, a toddler-like piefication of the world, and the cheerios and the pasta sauce and the Oreos and the egg nog and the low fat yoghurt rise up from my cup of coffee.

Just in case you think I’m about to make fun of maple syrup: I’m a proud, passport-carrying, apologizing Canadian. Of course I’m not going to make fun of maple syrup. I am going to make fun of the State of Vermont. Now, I have nothing against Vermont, it’s a beautiful state, but it must be hard being so close to Canada. It’s just inviting comparisons, and who can measure up to Canada in the maple syrup game? So I’m not surprised that Vermont is feeling a little, how shall we put it, inadequate on the syrup front. It’s almost like Vermont is trying to tell us something about its ability to produce buckets of syrup. I just — I just can’t put my finger on it though.